Asus EAH3870 TOP Review - PAGE 3

The Asus EAH3870 TOP comes in a big gray box, with the two familiar soldiers of Company of Heroes Opposing Fronts, taking up about half the box. Sometimes, bundeled games only warrant a sticker on a video card's box -- it's interesting to see how far Asus teamed up with Relic to cross-promote their video card with this AAA title. Opening the box's cover up reveals more about Opposing Fronts, as well as a mention of a new piece of Asus software: the Gamer OSD. However, the box does lack listing the game's minimum system requirements.

The TOP (Top Overclocking Performance) branding is also very noticeable here -- so no searching serial codes to see if you are getting the overclocked version of the card. A marketing graph boldly embellishes the performance gains of the overclocked TOP card to a "generic" HD 3870.

The back of the box features eleven languages, and a little bit about the bundled software, which I will go over next.

The Bundle

The bundled software for the Asus EAH3870 is quite nice. Foremost, of course, you get the excellent Opposing Fronts. While perhaps not really suitable for a casual gamer, most potential HD 3870 owners out there would love a copy of this WW2 strategy game made by Relic. Besides being a stand-out real-time strategy game, Opposing Fronts also looks great, and compliments the abilities of the HD 3870.

Besides this game, the Asus EAH3870 also comes with a collection of good applications. Of particular personal appreciation, SmartDoctor was a pleasant and easy piece of software to use. This program can further overclock the Asus EAH3870, monitor its temperature, and control its fan. Not sure why there is no shader clock overclocking feature, but anyways, a good program nonetheless. A new arrival into the Asus software collection, GamerOSD, is also included with the HD 3870. This is a light but useful program that can be used to take screenshots, movies, and measure FPS and overclocking efficiency with.

Further rounding out the software bundle are Splendid (a video player) and Video Security Online (which can be used to visually monitor your home remotely).

Beyond software, the Asus HD 3870 comes with: a driver CD, a thick quick-start pamphelt, a leather DVD case, a CrossFire bridge, a S-Video to composite adapter, a DVI to HDMI adapter, a DVI to VGA adapter, HDTV cable, and a molex-to-PCIE power adapter.

Comments

Trying to, it's really odd to see how some of these cards are performing though in tests. Sometimes they come up high, other times the 3850 comes up higher. @_@ hopefully some level of stability can come around for all this.

I'm still interested in the AMD / NVIDIA config files in Crysis, only to see what benefits / caps come out of all this since it could even mean that owners might be able to get some additional engine optimizations out of it all.

Another good Pro-consumer review, thanks again Kspiess for the good read. I wish Amd dropped the price a little more to make the price/performance more relevant to how the 3850/3870 perform unless its driver error where they could actually correct the performance and justify the the near 8800gt price for less than that performance. But they are still great cards for the price just to me the 3850 would be a better buy than the 3870 if strapped on cash then you got the 8800gt which would be the better buy if you saved a couple more clams to put down vs the 3870. Argh to me feels like price bloatation.

once again i am not impressed, it struggles agaisnt the 8800GTS 320 at times and looses most of the time to the 8800GT 256mb model. Its a 2900XT with a new name and similar preformance practiclly and the 2900XT failed to impress anyone so why should the HD 3870, AMD needs to pull there head out and work on something worthwhile before they launch another disapointment.

Actually it is, it has been since pretty much the launch. The cards are slowly starting to come down right now, some with rebates bringing it below the MSRP while others hang high.

Hopefully the inflation quits being so bothersome and they kick down the prices. With 8800GT's at $241 the 3870 starts to get stiff competition. (Yes I'm talking about the 512 model not the 256, why someone would go for 1/2 the ram is beyond me given how easily these games cap out texture memory now)